What is The bubble chart ? How can we develop and use it in Project ? Saving Changes...
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Anton OosthuizenSenior Business Analyst / Project Manager| Self EmployedPretoria, Gauteng, South Africa
It is essentially a scatter chart with the added dimension of size and used to depict analytical patterns. I've never used it in PM but I guess you could use it to show variance impact? I'm also thinking progress but not sure if it will work since there is no concept of 100%, only relative size. The use in PM is probably quite limited, but I might be wrong. Saving Changes...
S RajasekarSenior Project Manager| AllscriptsBangalore, Karnataka, India
A bubble chart is a variation of a scatter chart in which the data points are replaced with bubbles, and an additional dimension of the data is represented in the size of the bubbles. Just like a scatter chart, a bubble chart does not use a category axis — both horizontal and vertical axes are value axes Saving Changes...
I'd agree with Anton that it's not commonly used by project managers although it might provide an interesting method of showing a third dimension to the risks in a risk register (e.g. impact vs. probability on the XY axes, and detectability or some other parameter representing the bubble size).
The more common usage of bubble diagrams is when analyzing a set of projects as part of a portfolio project management process. The X and Y axes would represent two key dimensions that we are interested in (e.g. risk, reward) and the size of the bubbles would represent the relative cost of each project.
Bubble chart is a technique of the Perform Qualitative Risk Analysis process used to display risks that have been categorized by using more than two parameters (answer from the PM PrepCast Simulator).
Sample Data for the Bubble Chart:
Risk ID Likelihood Impact Exposure Category
R1 High High $50,000 Technical
R2 Medium High $30,000 Financial
R3 Low Medium $10,000 Operational
R4 High Low $5,000 External
R5 Medium Medium $20,000 Technical
This Bubble Chart would visually demonstrate to project stakeholders which risks have the greatest potential impact on the project, based on their likelihood, impact, and overall exposure. For example, R1, being a high-likelihood, high-impact risk with the largest exposure (bubble size), would be identified as a critical risk that needs immediate attention and mitigation strategies. Meanwhile, risks like R4, despite their high likelihood, would be deemed less critical due to their low impact and exposure. Saving Changes...
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